This invention relates to a telephone dialer and more particularly to a repertory dialer to be used in conjunction with a telephone for instant recall and automatic dialing of a plurality of stored telephone numbers.
Significant technical strides have been made in the field of telephony. In particular, modern day telephone systems are capable of making rapid connections between a called and a calling party and include sophisticated electronic components to accomplish improved communications capabilities.
The basic telephone subset has also undergone changes in regard to dialing techniques. Presently, a great many modern telephones employ touch tone dialing. Touch Tone dialing uses a multifrequency code to generate dialing signals so that a telephone number can be transmitted by a tone or frequency pattern. This frequency pattern is decoded by the telephone system to determine the dialed number. Such telephones conventionally employ a keyboard which consists of a plurality of keys, each one indicative of one digit as 0 to 9. The keys when operated provide the tone pattern indicative of the dialed number. Touch tone dialing is used in lieu of the dial pulse techniques employed in prior art telephones.
It is apparent that there is a need in conjunction with such telephones to provide apparatus which enables the automatic and rapid dialing of a predetermined telehpone number without requiring the user to dial the various digits of a number in a conventional manner. Such automatic telephone dialers presently exist on the market and operaate to store numbers on data cards such as punch cards, magnetic cards and so on. In these systems, a party of location is selected by the user and upon the implementation of an appropriate command, the telephone apparatus automatically dials the number according to the data stored.
It is an object of the present invention to provide an automatic dialing apparatus which is integrally associated with a telephone and which is simple to operate and extremely reliable and economical to implement.